The organization of Small Marketing Agencies at a crossroads: combining standardization and innovation

Professional service firms (PSFs) are key actors in the knowledge economy, providing intangible, knowledge-intensive, and customized services and promoting innovation processes in marketing-related activities. A particular type of PSFs is that of marketing agencies, which have acquired an emerging role in the last decades and are currently facing emerging business challenges. This is particularly true for small marketing agencies (SMAs), which, despite their prevalence and relevance, have only attained limited attention in the literature so far. This short paper aims to provide an initial contribution to fill this relevant gap by discussing an explorative case study on the changes that SMAs undergo in terms of organizational configuration to meet the evolving market challenge. Preliminary findings provide insights in terms of emerging organizational configurations at the Actors, Resources, and Activities’ (ARA) layers.